What If You’ve Been Meditating Wrong? Insights from 3 Ancient Cultures

You wake up anxious. Your mind races. The to-do list grows longer, and even when you sit to meditate, stillness feels impossible.

Sound familiar? You might not be meditating “wrong” — just not in the way your body truly needs.

In this episode of Cultivating Inner Peace, host Anshu Bahanda speaks with Yirser Ra Hotep — a master of Kemetic meditation, Tai Chi, and Qigong — as he reveals how ancient wisdom from Egypt, China, and India offers a very different take on what meditation really is.

Together, they explore how movement, breath, posture, and awareness are seamlessly integrated into daily life across these traditions — and how that can help soothe your nervous system, anchor your awareness, and bring you back to your body.

If sitting still doesn’t work for you, maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe it’s the method.

🎧 Tune in now to discover how ancient cultures reimagined meditation — and ask yourself: is it time you did too?

For a transcript of this show, go to https://wellnesscurated.life/what-if-youve-been-meditating-wrong-insights-from-3-ancient-cultures-2/

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Transcript

Anshu Bahanda: Have you ever had one of those days where you keep picking up your phone, you keep checking messages, you know you have a to-do list which is getting longer and longer, your mind is driving you crazy. You're all over the place and you're so busy doing things that you forget to be. And if you try and sit down and stop your mind, it doesn't happen. Your mind is still racing. You're trying to breathe and calm yourself down, but it doesn't happen. I'm sure we've all been through days like this where life's just taken the better of us.

In this fast-paced world that we live today, we crave stillness, we crave inner stillness, we crave inner stillness, we crave inner peace and we don't always get it. Today we're going to talk about all these things and more.

Welcome to Cultivating Inner Peace. This is a special series under Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living. I'm your host, Anshu Bahanda. And today we're going to turn to ancient traditions to answer a deeply modern need. How do we get our minds to rest and how do we reconnect with our internal energy? I find that the days I don't do my meditation in the morning or I don't do my breath work, my day takes a very different turn from the days when I do. So, the odd day when I miss it, I'm not in control of my day. Of course we can't control our lives completely, but there are certain elements of our lives which we can control. And today we're going to delve into not just this buzzword meditation that people are talking about and you know, it's cool to meditate. We're going to go into the tradition of meditation and how it's rooted in things like breath, movement, energy, awareness. And we're joined with an exceptional guest today. He's a keeper of century old wisdom. His name is Yirser Ra Hotep. He's a master of Kemetic meditation. Now this is an Egyptian practice and it's not that easy to find Kemetic meditators in the West at least. I've met one when I was in Egypt.

Yirser is also a practitioner of Tai Chi and Qigong which is a Chinese system and it's a system of breathwork and movement which changes your internal energy. He's practiced for about four decades now and we're very excited to have you here, Yirser, to talk about all kinds of things. To talk about aligning the breath, the body, the mind and the spirit. Welcome to our chat.

Yirser Ra Hotep: Thank you for that wonderful introduction and I'm very honored to have, you know, to be a guest here on your show and to talk about Kemetic meditation. Sometimes we said the word K meditation combined with the word, with, you know, with the term Kemetic.

AB: So, I met someone in Egypt, in Cairo who was a Kemetic healer. Explain the difference to me. 

YR: The thing about it is that there's all types of different aspects of yoga, meditation, healing, energy work. People are using the term Kemetic. And so, for your audience, let me just say this first. Kemet, K-E-M-E-T is the original name for Egypt. The word Egypt is a Greek word. So when we talk about Kemet, we're talking about going back to the original African concept of this place that people now call Egypt. Kemet was in existence for thousands and thousands of years before other people came and renamed it Egypt. Okay, so, Kemet is the original name. This is where we get the word chemistry from, you know. 

AB: I didn't know that. 

YR: So, words like chemistry, you know, comes from Kemet. So, when we talk about Kemetic yoga, Kemetic meditation, we are acknowledging that these great and high civilizations had systems of healing that were in existence thousands and thousands, and I would say tens of thousands of years ago. Many tens of thousands of years ago. 

AB: I want to ask you just to put it into context for people who are listening in. What is meditation to you? Not a specific kind of meditation, just general meditation. What does it mean to you? 

YR: Meditation to me is a process of transformation. It's a process of healing myself physically and psychologically and being able to detach myself away from the effects of the world of phenomenon. That's what I call it, the world of phenomenology, where I am reacting and responding to external stimuli. So, I am training myself to simply be, you know, my own self. To, to really discover my own true self, my own true nature. 

AB: You do two different forms of meditation, right? You do Tai chi and Qigong, which are movement-based meditations. And then you do Kemetic meditation. From your experience, I'm sure you've come across many, many different forms of meditation. Are they very different from each other or is it just different paths to the same thing? 

YR: Different cultures express meditation and healing in different ways, but they're all the same thing. Most systems of healing, most systems of meditation, most systems of yoga, they use some from a practice perspective. They use breathing, controlled breathing. They use a concept of becoming aware of the circulation and movement of Internal energy. I was attracted to Tai Chi and Qigong because it was very similar to the way that we discovered that yoga should be practiced. You know, so when you're doing Tai Chi, you are doing it in, you know, in the sense of breathing, inhaling, drawing energy into the body, moving the energy through the energy channels of the body, directing the energy. We do yoga in the same way we do our yoga movements and postures. And the yoga movements and postures that we see on the walls of the temples of ancient Egypt or Kemet actually helped to facilitate this energy. So, we see that there's a similarities and correlation between all of these systems. They're all ancient systems and they have their origins with ancient and indigenous people of different parts of the earth. And sometimes the practices are different, but that's only because of just changes in, you know, environment, changes in location and so on and so forth. 

AB: It's interesting you're talking about yoga because even in the Patanjali yoga sutras, which is, you know, the scripture that explains yoga to us, they talk about all these things that need to be done before you can sit down to meditate. And part of, you know, there's Yama Niyama, there's Asanas, the movement, there's the breathwork, the Pranayams, all this that needs to be done before you're ready to meditate. Even in Kemetic meditation, there are Kemetic poses. In Tai Chi, there's movement. So how do you think movement leads to meditation? How are they related and how do they lead to cultivating inner peace? 

YR: Well, when I look at Patanjali and I look at the yoga sutras, when I look at the systems that we have been able to decipher from ancient Kemet. To me, they're all the same thing. You know, I don't separate meditation from yoga. I don't say what yoga is this. And then meditation is that. The end goal of all the systems is achieving a state of transcendence.

So, in order to achieve transcendence, you have to go through these prerequisites. I think that is what Patanjali is saying, that you have to deal with the Yamas and the Niyamas, you have to deal with the Asanas. All of those things are preparing you, leading you to the point where you can then achieve this state that we call meditation. And then within meditation, we may have certain practices that are, in addition to the other practices that are leading through, leading us to meditation. You know, in order to change your, you know, changing your behaviors, doing things that you should, you know, doing positive things like the Yamas and Niyamas, stop doing things which are unproductive or are going against, you know, nature, you know, right behavior, all of those things. Eating properly, treating other people, properly, treating yourself in the right way, and then reinforcing those behaviors through your movement, disciplining yourself through movements, through postures, through breathing, then helps you to achieve this state where you become still and you sit in meditation. So, it's all connected. They're not separate. They're just part of the whole system. To me, it's like. 

AB: Coming specifically to Kemetic meditation, which is based on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and spiritual science. Also, you talk about Ma'at, which is the principle of balance and harmony. So, can you explain to me how does Kemetic meditation help not just physically, but at an energetic level as well? How does it help people achieve, you know, the peace that they're looking for in modern life today?

YR: Well, we have this term Ma'at, and this is a very important term in understanding the ancient African perspective on the nature of the universe. So Ma'at is emerging from the culture of ancient Africa, when I say ancient Africa, I'm talking about Kemet. I'm talking about Nile Valley. The Nile Valley runs for over 7,000 miles from South Africa all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. And so all along there, there was a culture, there was a civilization.

And this whole culture and civilization gave birth to this concept and this idea that we call Ma'at. And Ma'at means that there was a certain order, that there's a certain way that the universe expresses itself. And so, we said that there's an order which is characterized by balance, by harmony, by justice, by reciprocity. And these different ideas of when we behave, when we think, when we act, when we create institutions, when we relate to other people from perspectives of authority, that we are doing it, you know, in a just type of way. So, this has given us the idea that we should have justice in the way that we treat ourselves and the way that we treat others. Right? And so, your goal of your meditation is to achieve this state of consciousness that we can call Ma’at consciousness, where we are experiencing this within ourselves. If we are in discordance with ourselves on the internal level, if our mind, our body, our spirit, our consciousness are not, if those different aspects of ourselves are out of balance with each other, then we would not be in this state of Ma’at, we would be in a state of disorder, which in ancient Africa was called Isfit.

AB: Isfit? 

YR: Isfit. Right. I S F I T. And so, you can either be in Ma’at, which is order, or you can be out of order. And this is something that if you examine every culture, every indigenous ancient culture, you will see the same concepts and ideas being expressed in different ways, maybe with different words, with different concepts, but to me it's all the same. 

AB: Absolutely. I've seen it in every culture, this concept of universal laws. And when you come out of alignment with them, that's where issues happen. That's where dis-ease happens. 

YR: Right? So, disease. So, for example, as you say, the word dis ease, even look at that word disease, a lack of ease. You know, you know, if you're using the, using the word in the English context, because we're speaking English because of different circumstances of why we're speaking English, right? But even so, in that we have a state of disease, a state of imbalance. So, when we achieve health, so when we look at our health and our well-being from an indigenous, from a non-European concept, we say that our dis ease, that our health issue is not just the result of the presence of a disease factor or some type of biological agent that is invading our body, but it is the result of an imbalance, a lack of Ma’at.

So, our goal is to re-achieve that balance which we call health. And so, in ancient Kemet, this state of health was called Sineb, bringing yourself back into that state of health, that state of well-being, that state of balance.

AB: So, I want to talk about another concept which is used universally. You talked about these universal laws, but something that is used in Kemet, something that's used in Qigong and Tai Chi, is this concept of Shechem or Chi, the concept of energy and the importance of energy and the importance of inner energy and being able to connect to your inner energy. Talk to me about that. For someone who's new, who's just beginning to explore meditation, how would you explain this to them? 

YR: Energy is life force. When we as human beings come into the material world that we exist in now, we come with our bodies and we come with our energy, our life force. We come with a certain force that causes us to be alive, that is stored within us and it has a lifespan. Right? Because we know that eventually it expires. Okay, so in India, one of the words that may be used is Prana, right? Yes. Life force. In China, they may use the word Chi. Chi. Yes. Okay. In ancient Kemet, they have various words and names to express the various expressions of this life force. So, you may hear the term Ankh. So, I wear the Ankh around my neck which represents life, okay? And then we have another word called Shechem. So, we have life in general. We have Ankh representing life in many aspects from a philosophical perspective of the way that life is expressed in the universe. But then we have the word Shechem that is referring specifically to the way the energy is moving through the body, right? When you see the king, when you see the pharaoh, the so-called pharaoh, he has a crown on his head, and on the crown on the front of the crown, he has a little snake which we call Wadjet. That snake is on the forehead, right? And that snake represent what you would call in India, Kundalini. We see that this idea of Kundalini, this idea of serpent energy is expressed in different ways in various cultures, but almost all of them use the metaphor of the snake.

AB: Yes, yes. Right. 

YR: Shechem, or, you know, it may be pronounced different ways by different people, it represents that same energy, that same general energy that is called Prana, Chi, so on and so forth. 

AB: Yes. And it's interesting again, the Kundalini energy. So, I go to these meditation courses by Dr. Joe Dispenza. I don't know if you've heard of him. 

YR: Yeah, I think I've heard the name before.

AB: And what he's done is taken this concept of Kundalini energy and tried to make it available to the masses and try to teach it to large groups in ways that audience, a global audience, can understand it. And he's sort of tried to mechanize the process in a way. And it's really interesting how you see people who've never meditated before their Kundalini energy being awakened and the reactions you see there, I mean, it's just amazing.

YR: Right. Let me say this about that. 

AB: Yeah. 

YR: In all of our practices, our ultimate goal is how can we awaken this energy, which is often considered to be dormant, because we have not engaged in certain practices that make us become aware and conscious of our true nature, right? And so when we start to awaken this energy, when we start to cause this energy to move and to circulate, it changes our consciousness, it changes who we are, and it changes who we are, how we think, how we behave, our connection, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with others, our relationship with the earth, with nature, with all the creatures of nature, the elements of nature, and our relationship and connection with the cosmos right? And so this is what our goal is, because our goal is to create, to recreate ourselves in as a reflection of nature, and to recreate the world, or to mold the world to its original intention, which is to be a reflection of the order and the balance of nature, and to live within that harmony and not to continue to go against it or to become in this state of disharmony which causes chaos.

AB: Beautifully put. Very nicely put. Thank you. I want to talk to you a little bit about Qigong and Tai Chi. So, I've had a little bit of exposure to it, not too much, but the odd time when I practiced it, you know, the beautiful movements, the graceful movements, the breath work along with it, iIt does create an internal shift. You can feel it. It's palpable. Can you talk to me more about how those very gentle movements help you reach within and help you with that peace, with that inner peace?

YR: From my perspective, from a Kemetic perspective, all movement is supposed to be done in coordination with controlled breathing. So, the way that I learned Tai Chi is that I am supposed to breathe in and draw energy up my spine, bringing it to the top of my head within the context of certain movements and I'm supposed to project that energy through the arms, into the hands, down the legs, into the feet, at certain. At certain points, at certain junctures within the context of the movements and postures that I am doing. So, when we're doing Tai chi, we are moving, but we are not just moving, we are breathing in a manner which is consistent with that movement, and we are projecting energy. So, if I extend my hand out this way, I am sending energy through my arm into my hand, and I'm projecting that energy, right?

And so, number one, the movement of this energy is what causes the internal healing to take place. It's causing your self to heal on an anatomical level. So, you are working with musculoskeletal system. You are strengthening your thigh, strengthening your knees, opening up your hips. We call opening up the hips the gate, right? So, it's like we're opening and closing the gate, the way that we move. We are shifting the weight from one area of the body into another area of the body. We are rooting ourselves in certain practices into the earth all the time. We are moving energy. We are feeling our hands being energized all the time with this life force. And it's almost like when you watch certain, certain movies, you know, you see their characters throwing energy out of their hands. This is a reference to, you know, you know, to Tai chi and this whole concept of cultivation of energy. When we practice Kemetic yoga, we apply the same principle that we are moving energy.

When we do any type of yoga, any type of movement, it's always with the idea that we are moving energy. We are moving this energy and causing this circulation to take place. So, we are healing ourselves like I say, on an anatomical level, we are healing the internal organs.

There are certain practices that we do that affect the liver, the kidneys, the spleen, the heart, the lungs, the brain. You know, we do certain practices that have specific impact on these different aspects of a being. That's what we call Chi, you know, so, so then we start getting into the more refined practices that we call Qigong, right? And so, then we're doing, we're making certain sounds, right? We are making certain vibrational sounds that correspond to different organs with organ systems within the body. All of these things that we're doing is geared towards healing ourselves and changing not just the physical structure of the body, but also the vibrational frequency that the body is operating on. And so, we're changing ourselves on a cellular level because our body's composed of billions and billions of cells. We're selling us, we're changing ourselves on a molecular level because we know that all of these particles that make us up are molecules and that molecules behave and operate on a certain level of vibrational frequency, and we're changing ourselves on an atomic level. And the word atom. So, the atom is the smallest unit of matter. And we know that this word has its origins in ancient Kemet. And what people call ancient Egypt, but we say ancient Kemet. So, one of the primary, when you look at the mythology and the stories of Kemet, we see the word Aten, which is where the word atom comes from, you know, and there's a connection between Aten, atom, Adam, the first so called, supposedly, you know, person. Adam. There's a connection, linguistic connection between these words. And when we start to study these things, we start to understand these different connections. Then we can see the new, the universality of these practices. So different cultures, because we have cultures in Africa. There're 52 countries in Africa, but there's many, many, many cultures. There're hundreds if not thousands of languages. And so, but as we explore these languages, we see that they speak different languages, but they say the same thing in a different way.

AB: Where at the beginning of the meditation, you say, I'm not my body, I'm not my mind. And if we remember that we're not our minds, then a lot of the emotions stop bothering us because you can then watch them go by. It's easier to do this when you're sitting and meditating, but to use it in everyday life all the time is not easy. And that's what I want to ask you. When you feel that you become ungrounded or you feel overwhelmed, or you feel anxious, as I'm sure you do sometimes, what helps you? Is it a posture? Is it a ritual? Is it breathwork? You know, is there a technique that helps you get back to centre? Please tell us. 

YR: It is everything. I make sure that I get my nutrients because my nervous system, I can tell myself all kind of different things. But if I do not consume the foods that I need to have, that have the proper amount of B complex and vitamin B12, in addition to vitamin C and other nutrients that my nervous system needs, I can tell myself all kinds of things philosophically.

But I must put those elements into my body because they are necessary to help my nervous system, help my brain to reestablish that balance. So, my nutrition is important, my hydration is important, moving my body, walking, doing the things that's necessary to train my cardiovascular system to get my heart rate at a certain level, all of those things are important to do, right? So having a lifestyle, again, this is where we get into the Yamas and the Niyamas. Having a lifestyle is important. Having a lifestyle which is designed scientifically to give us what we need, right? If my lifestyle says, oh, when I feel stressed, I'm going to go eat some pizza, I'm going to go have a drink, I'm going to go to the bar and have 10 beers and all that kind of stuff, you know, then that is counterproductive. So, understanding basic things, understanding the elements in meditation, when you are training to really become a meditation person or, you know, whatever, you know, the master, the student, you know, you are learning about nature. You learn about the elements. Earth, air, fire, water. You know, I hate to make it so esoteric, but you have to learn about those things. Your body is earth, air, fire and water. So, you have to know how to put those things into your body and reestablish your nature and connect yourself to those things, right?

AB: On that note, I want to ask you something. For someone who's new to all this, if we want to give them one thing that they can do when they start feeling anxious.

YR: The most fundamental, basic thing to do is to breathe, right? But what I'm saying.

AB: Come back to your breath. 

YR: It goes back to your breath. But let's say this. Let's say if I say take your arm and extend and then bend to the side and then come back up and put your hand down and do this and go to the side and come back up, and then come down and then bend forward and then come back up, that movement automatically causes you to use your breath. Because I am conscious of the role of my breath, I'm going to inhale and exhale. But if I'm not conscious of my breath, if I just raise my arm and do this, or move my head back, or move my head forward and move my head to the side, I'm going to unconsciously begin to become aware of my breathing, or the effects of breathing is going to occur automatically. So, everything is about returning back to your breath. If you have a mantra and you say a word or you make a sound, all of those, you know, you repeat the sound in your head, or you may repeat the word verbally, right? What's the effect of that? It causes you to slow your breathing down. Everything is about the breath because. 

AB: So, you're saying, come back to the breath and slow your breath down. Slow your breathing down. However you do it, come back to your breath. 

YR: You may get instruction from your teacher, like, say you practice some form of meditation. The teacher may say, say this word, say this mantra, but the effect of it is going to be returning back to your breath. That's what the effect is going to be. I say bypass all of those things and just slow down and just take a slow, deep breath. Take five breaths, inhale slowly, exhale slowly five times, and you should start to feel the effects. Whatever person does, we as human beings, we have to understand that practice is essential. 

AB: I absolutely agree with you. It's all about a practice, and it's all about living your life a particular way. Everything in your life a particular way. But for people who are starting it, it's useful to give them little steps and they can take baby steps to get to the bigger goal. So, thank you. And I think coming back to the breath was very interesting. So, a lot of people say, oh, we've tried to meditate, but we're not able to meditate. How can we make it such that people actually look forward to their meditation. Like, I don't start my day till I'm meditating. If I'm running late, I will cancel a meeting, but I will not, not meditate because it's such an, because I know it's such an important part of my life. How do we get people to see that aspect? Because there's a lot of people who really struggle with meditation 

YR: Because they think meditation is this thing that is separate and everything that they do. If I wash my dishes, I am meditating. You know, if I'm cleaning my floors and whatever organizing something I am meditating. Become aware of your breathing, understanding that meditation is a constant. It's not something that you do and that you have to do in a certain way in order to be successful. We think about, oh, did I successfully meditate today? You do not judge yourself. That's part to judge yourself and to judge the quality of your meditation. Did I meditate correctly? Did I meditate? Well, that is the opposite of actually meditate.

That's opposite of the goal of meditation. In meditation, you're trying to be non-judgmental. Right? 

AB: Right. 

YR: You cannot judge yourself. Did I meditate well? Did I meditate properly? If you get, if you take the time to try to meditate, that's what the key is. And whether you think you're successful every day or not, you are successful because you tried your best to do what you could do and it had an effect. Whether you are conscious of it or not, it's having an effect.

So, stop judging yourself. Stop assessing yourself. Because doing that judging and doing that assessing is part of what you're trying to overcome as a result of you meditating in the first place. If you get up in the morning and you do your meditation and then you say, oh, I didn't do that very well, but you did it. That's, that's the goal. You'll get better over time, you know, but so don't. But don't judge yourself. That's all I'm saying. 

AB: Very good point. Very, very good point. And on that note, I would like to end this chat and say a very big thank you to you. Yasir, thank you for your time. Thank you for clearing so many misconceptions that people have about meditation. The things I'm going away with today are very important points, don't judge yourself because we all tend to forget. Be kind to yourself. Don't judge yourself. Form some sort of a regular practice, however that works for you. And the other very important thing that you said was how you can find that inner peace and stillness in everything that you do. You know, in all the tasks that you do, in the breaths that you take, in the steps that you take, in the postures and in the mundane tasks and the pauses in life, everything should be treated like a meditation. Thank you. And to our listeners, thank you for being here. I hope you learned something incredible. I hope you learned that peace isn't a destination, it's a practice. It's a journey. And enjoy that journey, because that journey should be full of joy and love and happiness. It shouldn't be a chore, and it shouldn't be overwhelming. Thank you for being here today, and we will see you next time. 

YR: Thank you very much.